Rwandan Wedding, the actual wedding--no monkeys

The Wedding was supposed to start at 4:30 so we left the house at 3:30, arrived at 4:00 and waited for the wedding party until after 6:00. Over eager victims of Rwandan time yet again, but well worth the wait.

The reception is completely different from wedding receptions in the U.S. The chairs for the guests are set up like the church. The groom's guests sit on the left and the bride's guests sit on the right. There are no dinner tables because dinner isn't served. The wedding party, including immediate family, sits on a platform in the front. Theree bride, groom, and their best man and maid of honor sit at a table in the front, with the rest of the wedding party behind them in rows.

After everyone is seated, each side picks a member of their family, typically an elderly uncle or father to finalize the bonding of the families. These two men sit and drink banana beer that is made of a mixture of homemade beer from the towns of both the bride and groom. The two men introduce themselves to each other and sit and talk for a bit. Then the bride and groom come to sit with them and also must drink from the huge jug of beer.

After all of this beer drinking business is done, traditional Rwandan dancers come in to dance for the couple. The women wear tank tops with one shoulder shawl type coverings and a long skirt. The men wear crisscrossed suspenders and a skirt made of dried, long grasses. There is a choir that is accompanied by drummers that provide the music for the dancers. The group comes in and out throughout the evening to entertain the couple and their guests.

They also have the bride and groom toast each other...with Citron Fanta. It's fabulous! Then they make their way over to the cake. The cake has a house on a platform instead of the bride and groom. There are two towers one on each side that are given to the mothers of the bride and groom that are intended to signify the grandchildren they will give them. The friends of the bride help cut up the cake and pass out a piece to each guest. They also give out a Fanta or Coke to everyone.

The best part was towards the end when the dancers came back...bearing gifts. I'm not sure who bought these gifts for the couple, but they are symbolic of the traditional gifts given to help the couple start their new life together. The bride goes first and she was given banana leaf, handwoven floor mats, baskets, and other house related gifts. The groom follows, receiving gifts used to protect his family: a spear, a bow and arrow set, and a leopard skin to display to send the message to enemies that he is a good hunter.

After all the gift giving comes the dance off. That's right a dance off. The dancers start and then one man from each family got up to challenge each other. Guests would run up to them and give money to the best dancer. Everyone was up out of their seats cheering and laughing, watching these men do their thing.

Each relative is given the opportunity to get up and present their gift. Some people decided to make announcements to offer cows, goats, or chicken to the couple. Cows are a sign of wealth in Rwanda and each milk cow costs about $1,000 USD. This couple was given two. Innocent, who took us to the wedding, offered his help to his cousin, the bride, in getting a job.

After the wedding reception, the real party begins as guests move on to the couple's new home and carry in all their new furnature and food for everyone. It was getting too late so we weren't able to stay to go to the house, but I heard it's a good time for all. There's an impromptu dance party that starts and everyone finally relaxes without much formality. An interesting twist to the wedding, and as someone who's moved too many times, much appreciated!

Best plan ever...

I'm going out of town this weekend to visit the Nyungwe National Forest. It's a little known, hidden Rwandan treasure of a rainforest that houses troops of Colobus monkeys that are as large as 400 in number and habituated groups of chimpanzees. I'm leaving very early tomorrow morning for the 4 hour bus ride to stay at the Gisukuru Guesthouse for a night at the tea plantation. Hopefully I'll get some hiking in tomorrow afternoon and then it's Chimp trekking at 5 am Saturday morning!

Each hiker is given a guide as part of the park fee, so someone from the ORTPN (Rwandan national parks service) will help me out both days.

I should have some good pictures from my little excursion. I'll finish posting more stuff when I get back!

I went to a wedding and this is what went down part 1

Last Saturday a friend of mine at the clinic, Innocent, invited me to his cousin's wedding and needless to say it was incredibly eventful.

Figuring out what to wear to an American wedding can be quite a tricky task, but Rwandan weddings require a great deal of effort. My roommate Margot decided to wreak havoc on our closet and turned the morning into a rousing round of dress-up. I decided to wear a dress I had made here earlier in the week, but mention Margot's mess solely to bust her chops. You couldn't see our floor or beds because they were covered in discarded cloth, wrap skirts, and traditional garb.

Innocent showed up at the house to pick up Nina, Margot, and myself at 3:30 with the wedding reception starting at 4:30. We arrived at the hall around 4 and found out the wedding party was running very behind. Surprise! Innocent decided to help us pass the time with a tour of the grounds and explanation of the site. Turns out that the location of the reception was inhabited by some pretty interesting and mildly entertaining creatures. This facility is owned by a Catholic group that rents out the hall for weddings and houses priests and nuns who teach at the local schools. We walked around to the side of the hall where we stood in a wooded park area and listened to Innocent tell us about the property and his family.

As we're standing there I look towards the dormitories and see something vaguely familiar, yet totally out of place. There's a monkey hunched over sitting in the middle of the path leading to the back of the property. Yes, I was wearing my glasses. I just stood there staring at it when Innocent started laughing. Is that a monkey? You've never seen a monkey before? Well only in the zoo. They don't look different when they're in zoos. Thanks Innocent...

This was a truly bizarre experience. I've watched enough Jack Hanna and read enough Zoobooks to know that monkeys live in Africa, but still, I was completely caught off guard. My first instinct led my feet to move me directly towards this thing and my second instinct was the voice in my head saying, um you didn't get the rabies vaccine...hmmm...

This little monkey, about the size of a cat, came running towards me so fast, I thought he would be lucky to skid to a stop as he crashed into my legs, but at the last second he veered off to one side and flew into a tree. He stood perched on a low branch staring at all of us. I was watching him watch me when I see a flash of tan flying past me and realize we now have double the fun! Two whole monkeys. Fabulous. The other interns and I watched these two little guys for about 20 minutes as they chased each other around the clearing and up and down the trees. They were a riot.

The trees around us were filled with some very hard leaves that looked like they had started to develop into fruits, but got bored and quit. I found some green ones hanging close enough for me to pick, but too far out for the monkeys to get to and still remain in the tree. I picked the first one and dropped it at monkey A's feet. He snatched it up, scampered away and seemed to enjoy his treat. He came back and sat at my feet staring at me, so I picked another one and he took it from my hand. I turned around and the other interns were laughing. Looking around, I noticed that monkey B is jumping up and down making monkey noises reaching his tiny hand out to me. Ok. I'll see what I can do.

I turned back to the tree and reached up to grab another leaf. This one was tough and took me a longer time to break it off. I finally freed the weird fruitish thing and turned around looking for this monkey. No sooner had the words, "where'd he go," come out of my mouth, than that stupid monkey ran up behind me pinched the back of my ankle and ran away. Both of us screaming like little girls. Despite my instinct to chuck the hard leaf at him and smack him, I walked over to the tree he was in, reached out my hand, and offered him the treat. He took it as I looked up to see that a crowd had gathered to watch the mazungos playing with the monkeys. Needless to say everyone was laughing hysterically, including my intern friends.

When Nina stopped laughing, she looked at me straight-faced and said, "Dude, you were like, where'd he go? And I was laughing to hard, but really wanted to yell, "He's on your leg."

And that was how I got punked by a monkey...This is already the best wedding I've ever been to, and it hadn't even started yet.

some stuff

So I didn't add the picture web addresses as direct links. This has been brought to my attention as a source of some confusion so I thought I'd post a brief instruction.

All you have to do is copy the whole address for each set of pictures, one at a time and paste it into the address bar at the top. It would help to open another tab first so that you can still get back to my blog easily if you want to view all of the albums.

I hope that makes some sense, though my explanation sounds a little generic and confusing to myself so good luck.

I love the ordinary moments most of all...

"You've gotta know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em. Know when to walk away. Know when to run." This was the music playing in the car on the way to pick up Dr. JMV before heading off to Nyacungu to spend a day at the rural clinic. That's right. Kenny Rogers. This was followed by a rousing tune by Dolly Parton and some other guy, clearly a fabulous remake of the Sylvia and Mickey song: Love is Strange. I couldn't make this up if I tried. Nina and I are sitting in the back of the WE-ACTx car on a dirt road while Freddy, our driver, listens to a mix tape of old school country. "Do you like country?", he asks me. Oh man, do I ever! Freddy and I continue singing Kenny's gem of a song when it comes on a second time. Well I was singing, Freddy was screaming out what he thought the song lyrics to be. I couldn't have asked for a better start to my day.

We get to Nyacungu and see a handful of patients. Nothing too serious today, until this old woman walks in. Sorrowful face, sullen expression, hunched over, settles into the chair beside Dr. JMV's desk. I watch as she tells Dr. JMV something and he responds. This continues for a few minutes until the woman's eyes light up. She sits up straight and begins talking, quite animatedly, arms flailing, loud voice. What is going on?!?! Dr. JMV explains when she's done having her moment. She was tested for HIV this past October and the results came back positive. The woman was returning today for a standard 6 month follow up treatment, and today I was there when she found out the test results were wrong. She is in fact HIV negative. With one sentence back in October her life changed, seemingly forever, but today, with one sentence she her life did a complete 180. I can't imagine the heaviness of her diagnosis in October, but I was there to see the weight lifted, which is not a cliche description in this case. Dr. JMV continued to translate her words for us.

She was a genocide survivor, but her husband was not. She never remarried and swears she has never been a prostitute. She has spent the last 8 months trying to figure out how she, a celibate, church-going old woman, could have gotten this disease. She thanked and praised God, Dr. JMV, along with Nina and I. I swear, she danced her way out of the room. Until that moment I have yet to see such a spectacular moment in a person's life. Something so private. And I was there.

So how does it happen? Careless mistake? Could be. Rwandans don't have surnames that are passed from generation to generation like we do in the US. Instead, they are given Kinyarwanda surnames by their parents. Commonly, their first names are Christian names and so it is highly likely that there will be some people with the exact same name, certainly similar names. Most of the patients I've encountered here don't know the exact date of their birth, and are lucky if they can tell me the year they were born. The blood is drawn, labeled (sometimes sloppily), and then taken to the national laboratory for testing. Here samples are frequently mixed up due to the similarities in name. When the results are taken back to the area from which they came, they may not be for the right person.

Poor testing procedures? Maybe. There are some sights that do their own form of rapid testing where they use whatever testing kits are available to them at the time. The rapid test is pretty self-explanatory. It's a fast test for HIV, in the US it takes about 30 minutes. Dr. JMV explained that there have frequently been cases of people using expired testing kits that lead to greater false positive results. Keep in mind that while HIV/AIDS has been around and identified since about 1986, testing in the catchment area of Nyacungu started this past October.

That's right. October, 2006. And still the argument is made that Sub-Saharan Africa is receiving plenty of international help in dealing with the epidemic. How very George W. of us. Just ignore it and it'll go away. What you don't know won't hurt you. That's exactly right. People go away here every day and the international community continues to ignore it. It won't hurt us if we don't know. Hey, it's not like we're going to get AIDS. It's this exact ignorance that's killing Rwandans. Africans. Haitians. South Americans. Indians. The Poor.

My day didn't end there, though my preaching does for now. I came home after seeing a few more patients and found Seraphine, the woman that cooks for us during the week, preparing dinner in the kitchen. I was done for the day with my WE-ACTx duties, so I decided to step a little farther out of my comfort zone, right in my very own kitchen, and try to cook with Seraphine. I say 'out of my comfort zone' because I do not cook, nor speak French, both of which Seraphine does flawlessly.

I come in and ask her if she needs help. She tilts her head and squints at me like I'm completely nuts. I try again, remembering that she knows some English. Can I have a job? Job, she repeats. Yup, job. I pick up the knife she's using to chop vegetables and mime cutting. Oh! Job! she says. At this point another intern comes in and translates Seraphine's questions for me. Do you know how to cook rice? I reply, how hard can it be? It's just rice. Jocelyn translates. I get another strange look from Seraphine and she hands me a knife and a pineapple.

I've never sliced a pineapple before, but I'm now assuming it's easier than cooking rice so I hold the knife up to it to get a confirmation from Seraphine that I'm doing it right. Seeing me, the knife positioned in the middle of this daunting fruit, she takes the knife and the pineapple and makes the first cut horizontally across the top. Apparently, I should have stuck with the rice. I make exaggerated Oh I see faces, which I doubt very much actually convinced her that I have in fact, held a knife before. I cut the pineapple and soon, I'm in need of another job.

I get a look from Seraphine that tells me she was hoping I'd stay occupied with the pineapple for the next few hours while she finished her cooking. It was in that instant that I saw myself as the pain in the ass kid who needs a 'job' helping mommy in the kitchen by staying away from the real work. But I'm tenacious and so I pick up a knife and help her skin tomatoes. These tomatoes are smaller than the ones back home and the insides are very sweet, but the skins are very bitter and not commonly eaten. This is hard. The naked tomatoes are squishy and slippery. I spent more time picking them up from where they fell in the sink than actually skinning them. I look up and notice that Seraphine has been staring at me for a while, as she's shaking with silent laughter. You too slow tomato. She hands me a grater and a hunk of cheese. I'm banished to the dining room and I laugh my way out the door.

Now, I've made enough taco dip in my time to be able to work a cheese grater. Finally, success! I'm able to navigate my way through half a block of cheddar and as I hand the plate back to her, she laughs and says to me, you make me happy today.

I'm happy too, Seraphine.

The story of my life in Rwanda...

Today I went to children's support group. I almost killed Burtan...the group supervisor. I get there and it's the hottest day of the season so far. It's so hot that the kids can't play. Over 100 kids between 5 and 18. Rounding up small children is difficult enough when I speak the same language as them, but forget it here. It took about 45 minutes to get them all seated, but that's only half the battle because now we need to get their attention.

Burtan gets up and starts yelling. They ignore him for a bit longer. Then he begins to quiz them about the lectures he has given them in the past. They talk about HIV, associated infections, nutrition, and healthy attitudes. I'm listening to Nyla, a trauma counselor, as she offers her hand at translation and randomly hear my name, look up, and see Burtan smiling with a million little hands waiving in the air. Uh-oh...

Burtan called me up to the front and informed me that the kids wanted me to give a lecture on Vitamins, nutrition, and healthy eating. Fabulous...let's all enjoy a good laugh about that...the future physician that openly detests fruits and vegetables has to explain good eating habits to a group of kids that are generally malnourished. I slowly walk to the front of the group and wait for Alice to translate for me. Alice is a great person with a huge personality, but nearly inaudible voice. Here's the scene: Me, standing in front of 100 kids, screaming "how many of you eat one piece of fruit each day" followed by Alice's hushed murmur of a translation and a sea of confused faces. Uh...ok. Once the kids got the general idea of my talk and my question, only about half of them raised their hand. I kept asking about their diets, following the same line of questioning and each time less than half the kids raised their hand.

After my quick polling, I started to lecture on the two fruits, most important for their immune system: oranges and bananas. About thirty seconds after I opened my mouth I leaned over and quietly asked Alice if they even have oranges here...it was going to be a long day...Once I had a list of culturally appropriate food, I started telling them about how to eat a little from each food group and what things were best for staying healthy while HIV+ and came to realize that even though Burtan claimed to have taught them about the immune system, they had no idea what I was talking about. So I back tracked a little and explained about the part of our bodies that fights off disease and protects us. At which point I had kids making gun motions and smacking each other. Not going well...I look around for Burtan to maybe help me out a little and he's no where to be found.

Ok, so let's move on. I get a suggestion being shouted at me from the back of the mob. It's another intern trying to convince me to tell them about the benefits of antioxidants in tea. Um, if these kids don't understand the immune system, I'm pretty sure terms like 'antioxidants' are going to be a bit more elusive. Eventually, I got across a couple of main points: bananas and oranges are good. Milk is good. Eat some fruits and vegetables each day and try to eat some meat. This is really quite a big joke because I've seen these kids eat and I know that if meat is available, there's not a chance in hell, they're going to pass it up. If they could maintain healthy eating habits, they would because anything is better than not eating and fruits and vegetables are cheaper than meat. There is virtually no chance of obesity, diabetes, or heart disease for this community.

My brief vitamin/nutrition lecture concluded with a question/answer session. This is the most important part of the discussion and I got in a fight with Burtan because he tried to cut it extremely short. He informed me that in Rwanda students are lectured to and not allowed to ask questions, so he felt that as long as I covered what he asked me to (which was pretty vague to begin with...vitamins, go!), things had been adequately accomplished. Well, the kids had quite a few good questions about sugar. I had to laugh because, despite their limited diet, kids love sugar. So I asked how many kids like Fanta. This time everyone raised their hand. So I tried to explain the little nutritional value held by soda and stressed the importance of milk and water. The day eventually concluded with Burtan volunteering me as the guest lecturer each week on a different health topic. This is only funny to me because it's so typical of my experience here. You're supposed to teach 200 kids english...last minute change to health topics two weeks earlier than your lectures were supposed to begin. I always felt like a pretty flexible person, but I now feel 100 percent justified in considering myself to have quite a bit of adaptability. Most days I'm flying by the seat of my pants...and yet it always works out.

Pictures Pictures Pictures

Since my blog has been misbehaving...really, it's more like me taking far too many pictures and then the poor blog gets overwhelmed and it yells an error message at me and I scream back and then we end up exchanging a few obscenities...I've found a way to show everyone my pictures with captions. Hopefully this works.

Gikongoro and Murambi Genocide Memorial:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2068687&l=da2fa&id=20003653

Traditional Rwandan wedding:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2068686&l=1ee03&id=20003653

Day of the African Child:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2067233&l=7d7dd&id=20003653

Rwanda Misc.:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2066262&l=f77a6&id=20003653

Children's Support Group 1:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2066253&l=47475&id=20003653

Children's Support Group part 2:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2066260&l=ddc03&id=20003653

Kigali and Icyuzuzo:
http://luc.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2065982&l=b08ac&id=20003653

I will try to post the links again each time I add new photos. Please let me know if this works. Enjoy!